Like ‘Take an Easy Ride’ before it, The Perils of
Mandy is another short film (just under 40 minutes) by Kenneth Frederick Rowles
that crams in more exploitation film incident than movies triple its
length. The Perils of Mandy manages to
cross off- a gratuitous shower scene, lesbianism, comedy transvestism, sex in a
haystack, a cat fight and spanking- from its perv check list, and that is just
within the first 10 minutes. Even the
opening titles double as T&A material, with credits appearing as lipstick
drawn onto the boobs and buttocks of two gyrating starlets. Such is the high sleaze content of The Perils
of Mandy that in 2010 plans to include it as an extra on the DVD release of
Take an Easy Ride were met with concerns that the inclusion of Mandy would
‘lower the tone’. Just let that sink in
for a minute, people were worried that this film might bring Take an Easy Ride
into disrepute!!!...plans to include Mandy on the Take an Easy Ride DVD were
dealt the final blow when it emerged that original elements to the film are now
missing, and that all director Rowles owned was a poor quality, VHS dupe.
The Perils of Mandy is as if Rowles had thought The
Wildcats of St Trinians (1980) had chickened out of providing an X-rated
version of the long running schoolgirl themed British comedy series. Then
decided to steal Wildcats’ thunder by making a knock-off production that would
really go for the pornographic jugular.
The Perils of Mandy elevates second string glamour
model and sex film actress Gloria Brittain- who’d had a bit part in Wildcats-
to leading lady status for the first, and only, time in her career. Her character Mandy, is an 18 year old
schoolgirl, spending summer at a private girls school. Mandy’s closest friends at the school are
Gloria, the school’s resident nymphomaniac, and Natasha who being “a foreign
bird” loves to get into fetishistic cat fights with other schoolgirls. The trio’s energetic, boob bouncing, early
morning jog catches the eye of a horny photographer, who frets that he can’t
get any decent shots of them. Enter the
villain of the piece, ‘The Teacher’ (Derrick Slater) a mortarboard sporting
pervert who never misses the opportunity to ogle the girls or make a quick
buck. “You’d be surprised at some of the
pranks they get up to in the showers” he leeringly tells the photographer, then
with a flash of Thatcherite entrepreneurialism demands cash in return for a
front row seat “everything costs nowadays, my boy”. Posing as an honorary sister, the
photographer dons a woman’s wig in order to take snaps of Mandy and Natasha
making out in the shower, but the girls quickly see through his disguise. Suddenly the photographer’s wig goes flying
and he is dragged into the shower and overpowered by the man-hungry girls. It’s a hard knock life. In scenes right out of fetish mags like Janus
and Roué, the teacher uses any opportunity to bend Mandy over his desk and cane
her in his office. “I’m sure this isn’t
legal anymore” complains Mandy. “This is
a very private school...little girls who misbehave must be punished” the
teacher barks back. Mandy’s reply “but I’m
not a little girl” is acknowledged by a grope of her big breasts.
“He’s always picking on you, it’s because you’re
pretty” another schoolgirl tells Mandy, and suggests Mandy could earn some
pocket money from nude modelling and film work in London. Inspired, the schoolgirl sneaks off behind
the Teacher’s back to the West End, where an audition for a “sexy send up film
on disco dancing” is being held. A scene
likely shot in the makers of The Perils of Mandy’s own office, since its
decorated with early VHS paraphernalia, as well as posters for the type of
B-level movies that were being given a second lease of life thanks to video.
Mandy manages to upstage the other three actresses
auditioning for the role, by tripping at the producer’s door and landing on her
bum in his office. One flash of her
cleavage later, and the cigar chomping producer is convinced she has the right
amount of sexiness and innocence for the part.
One of the other actresses refuses to go quietly into the night, vowing
“that was my part and no stuck up schoolgirl is going to take it away from
me”. She immediately gets on the phone
to the Teacher who is alarmed that Mandy becoming a sex symbol will bring shame
on his school. “If only I could get my
hands on her, I could trash some sense into her” he complains. Thus this bad time S&M duo concoct a plan
to kidnap Mandy, which would leave the rival actress with the lead role and the
Teacher with a victim to his corporal punishment kicks.
Whereas Take an Easy Ride used the pseudo-documentary
approach to present a cavalcade of kinks and bare flesh, The Perils of Mandy
opts for the facade of cheeky comedy, while thoroughly delivering the
sexploitation goods. Echoes of the St
Trinians and Carry On movies reverberate throughout The Perils of Mandy, but
Rowles uses the opportunity to push the envelope further than either of those
comedy series were prepared to go.
Rowles’ dirty old man tendencies are firing on all cylinders in The
Perils of Mandy. True to its Perils of
Pauline punning title, The Perils of Mandy pays tribute to movie serials of the
1930s and their S&M inclinations. ‘Cliff-hanger’
moments that find Mandy tied up and having to be rescued from the baddies, pop
up regularly in the film. In one such
scenario Mandy gets called to a filthy warehouse which turns out to be a trap
set by the Teacher, who is soon canning her and bellowing sentiments like
“young girls must be punished”, while his actress cohort strips Mandy to her
underwear and pulls her hair. Mandy
makes a run for it, but is quickly re-captured and chained topless to a
bed. The two other schoolgirls, Gloria
and Natasha, smell a rat and have a male friend drive them at top speed to the
warehouse, arriving just in time to overpower the actress and give the Teacher
a good kicking, who ends up with Natasha’s stiletto shoes being grinded into
his chest. By the end of the film, Mandy
is once again kidnapped by the grudge bearing actress who in time honoured
movie-serial fashion has Mandy tied to train tracks as a train approaches. “Is Mandy’s next big bang to be her last?,
will this be the last ride Mandy sees” asks the film’s plummy voiced narrator
“watch out for the next Perils of Mandy...coming soon”. No further Perils of Mandy instalments
emerged though, leaving the audience in suspense over the heroine’s fate, not
to mention Mandy herself in suspenders.
At the dawn of the 1980s, productions like The Perils
of Mandy and Precious Jewels, suggested the British sex film might yet still
have a future, maintaining shot on film production values but being aimed squarely
at the direct to video market, where they could take advantage of the then
unregulated nature of video. Of course,
it didn’t quite pan out that way, the days of unregulated video weren’t to
last, British pornography quickly did away with the need for narratives and
took the step down to shooting on videotape.
As such The Perils of Mandy ended up representing the end of the British
sex film, rather than a new beginning.
Fittingly it also served as a last reunion for several veterans of British
sexploitation. Co-producer and director
of photography Douglas Hill had been the cameraman on The Playbirds, Night
After Night After Night, and Rowles’ own The Ups and Downs of a Handyman. The Perils of Mandy also reunited Rowles with
The Ups and Downs of a Handyman writer Derrick Slater, who played the mad
rapist ‘Mr Black Gloves’ in Take an Easy Ride.
The Perils of Mandy offers Slater another chance to molest sex film
actresses onscreen, a role he attacks with such perverted enthusiasm that it is
tempting to view The Perils of Mandy as a quasi sequel to Take an Easy Ride,
with Slater’s Mr Black Gloves character hiding out from the police by donning a
mortarboard and calling himself ‘The Teacher’ instead.
The Perils of Mandy has no qualms about parodying the
very section of the British film industry it sprung from, revelling in clichés
about Soho smut peddlers. The producer
of the film within a film, Sid Creep, is a slippery, bewigged medallion man,
played in an exaggeratedly Jewish manner.
Creep’s director is a bald headed Von Stroheim type who auditions
actresses whilst fondling a cat o’nine tails.
If anything though, the real life criminal element that helped create
The Perils of Mandy is far more eye opening than their cartoonish onscreen
counterparts. The film’s co-producer
Toni Muldoon, also ran the VHS label ‘Vision-On Video’ which distributed The
Perils of Mandy on tape. Muldoon led a
life right out of a British gangster film, and not one of the good ones
either. As well as his above counter
involvement in Vision-On Video, Muldoon had his fingers in the illegal side of
the VHS trade. Muldoon would later
proudly boast to be the first person to have pirated Steven Spielberg’s E.T.
the extra terrestrial in the UK.
Allegedly, the result of Muldoon bribing a night watchman into ‘loaning’
him a print of the film, which Muldoon used to make counterfeit videos of E.T,
prior to its UK cinema release.
Muldoon’s 15 minutes of fame however would mainly be played out in the
Costa Del Sol, where Muldoon lived a millionaire lifestyle on the back of
running fake escort scams, money laundering, timeshare and debt elimination schemes. Muldoon left a trail of misery wherever he
went, and laughed all the way to the bank about it. The house of cards came
crashing down in 2013, when Muldoon was arrested and sentenced to seven and a
half years in prison. Toni Muldoon died
in 2019 at the age of 71, and was seemingly mourned by few. His own son described him as “a heartless,
immoral and unconscionable person who destroyed and bullied people with
devastating affect”.
As you might expect from a film made in such shark
infested waters, the production of The Perils of Mandy was a troubled one, with
rumours of promised funds never materialising and the film going
unfinished. The messy results are all up
there onscreen to see. Since scenes
depicting the shooting of Mandy’s big movie obviously never made it in front of
the cameras, Rowles resorts to inserting brief, behind the scenes footage of
The Perils of Mandy’s own filming as a kind of facsimile. A sequence meant to depict Mandy’s star on
the rise, is actually made up of footage from an earlier promotion film Rowles
had shot of Gloria Brittain, a sort of ‘day in the life of Gloria Brittain’
that saw the actress feeding pigeons in a park, buying a pineapple from a fruit
and veg stall and shopping in central London.
As with Take an Easy Ride, Rowles also throws lots of local colour into
the mix, working in shots of the Raymond Revuebar, the Dilly cinema club,
striptease routines and Soho backstreets...a beat that you just know all those involved
in this film had walked many, many times.
This dazzling tour around all the fleshpots that early
1980s London had to offer belies the fact that the bulk of The Perils of Mandy
was shot in Medway, out in Kent. It
later emerged that sexy scenes in The Perils of Mandy had been filmed at a
local sports centre, with the town councillors and sports management claiming
they’d been duped into believing that The Perils of Mandy was an innocuous
‘sports film’. When they cried foul to
The Sun newspaper, the authorities only played into Muldoon’s crooked hands by
giving The Perils of Mandy free publicity in a national newspaper “I was inundated
with phone calls asking when the video will be made available” he claimed.
Due, I suspect to Muldoon’s involvement, few people
are willing to talk about The Perils of Mandy these days, and how it came into
existence. The film gives the impression
of being commissioned by someone who was completely besotted by its lead
actress Gloria Brittain, and threw aside the concerns of others that Gloria’s
limited acting and slight speech impediment made her unsuitable leading lady
material.
The Perils of Mandy constantly plays fairy godmother
to Gloria’s Cinderella, waving its magic wand and bringing to life her dreams
of stardom. The film allowing Gloria to
play out the fantasy of making it in the big city...photographers swarm around
Mandy, supporting characters remark on how lucky Mandy is getting the lead role
in a film, and Mandy gets to be the focus of attention at a glitzy film
premiere. Even the character name Mandy
had autobiographical resonance for Gloria, ‘Mandy’ being one of the names she’d
used in her real-life modelling career.
The Perils of Mandy unashamedly dotes on Gloria, portraying her as an
innocent child-woman who is devoid of the exploitativeness, meanness and
vindictiveness that defines the characters who pursue her. The highlight of the film’s erotic
infatuation with her is a slow, seductive striptease Gloria performs to Shirley
Bassey’s 1970 cover version of ‘Light My Fire’, a sequence that ends with
Gloria totally naked and blowing kisses at an appreciative audience.
The reality of Gloria’s career never quite measured up
to the fantasy of The Perils of Mandy.
Strictly at the low end of the British sexploitation pecking order,
Gloria was last heard of working for Scottlee Studios in 1982, where amateur shutterbugs
could take photographs of her for £2 an hour.
The Perils of Mandy brings to life the dolly daydreams of a minor
starlet, but Gloria does come across as genuinely lovely and sweet, a far cry
from the mercenary divas who usually get such vanity vehicles built around
them. So surely only a perverted
headmaster, or a bitter rival would begrudge Gloria her one and only queen for
a day moment. Hey Teacher, leave those
schoolgirls alone.
